Gene Beery at Fri Art

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden. Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against an elemental usefulness."

Beery toys with this functionality, a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down. The trueness of statements, their ability to make sense, becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all. 

Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster

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It's no wonder the surrealists and conceptualists loved Beery, handing him hundreds on the spot, words can perform in a way that art doesn't, forming an address almost inherently surreal, a transmission between people, almost infiltrative, allowing its horsemen direct access to your head, to say whatever it wants, and already there, words hanging around inside you.


see too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project